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ARRIVING IN AN UNFAMILIAR CITY.

Andrey Matuzov — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 05:54:24 +0000

associate particular possibilities with urban life: work, freedom, entertainment, encounters. They fear being overwhelmed, loneliness and exclusion. Tokyo inspires different hopes and fears than Berlin or Zurich. Those who arrive in an unfamiliar city bring ideas with them – about urban life and about the city in which that life is supposed to unfold. There they encounter people with their own experiences, habits and ideas about living together. What happens in this encounter? How does the city change those who arrive? And how do those who arrive change the city?

The prose of Peter Weiss (1916–1982) takes us directly into this encounter. In Report on the Institutions and Customs in the Settlements of the Grey-Skins (Bericht über Einrichtungen und Gebräuche in den Siedlungen der Grauhäute), begun in 1953 and published only in 1968 in the collection Aus aufgegebenen Werken; in the novel Fluchtpunkt (1962); and in the story Der Fremde(1980), published under the pseudonym Sinclair, Weiss explores different experiences of arrival. A traveler tries to understand the unfamiliar activities of a city. An emigrant searches for a place to live in Stockholm. A narrator enters a city accompanied by his past.

Discovering and Experiencing

In the Report, the traveler encounters a city whose institutions and customs he does not know. At first, he sees an “intertwined throng of living beings”. From an elevated position, he observes movements, routes and vehicles. Then he descends into the crowd, enters a shop and, carried along by others, finds himself on a means of transport. He observes, imitates, misunderstands and revises his assumptions. What seems self-evident to the inhabitants is something he must gradually work out for himself.

The readers, too, initially fail to recognize what is happening. The collection and issuing of tickets appears as a “game of exchange”. The ticket guarantees its holder the “right to participate in this gathering”. Only gradually does the everyday activity become recognizable for what it is. Weiss avoids familiar terms and thereby reveals what they usually conceal: people must meet certain conditions in order to participate in a shared activity.

How much understanding a city depends on acquired knowledge can be experienced in many places. Anyone arriving at an airport in Tokyo for the first time encounters signs and terms whose connections are not immediately apparent. Suica, PASMO, JR, IC Card, Green Car – one can read the words without knowing how the system works. One observes others, compares, asks artificial intelligence for help and tries to develop an understanding of the whole from individual experiences.

The traveler in the Report already brings certain ideas with him. In his uncertainty, he recalls the stories told in his homeland about the inhabitants of the unfamiliar city. They are said to be bloodthirsty and vengeful. When people in a shop laugh at one of his awkward movements, he fears an attack. But nobody attacks him. Those present return to their activities. The traveler lacks the knowledge needed to find his way. At the same time, he possesses supposed knowledge that distorts his perception. Ignorance and prejudice alike make encounters with the unfamiliar more difficult.

The Report can be read as a literary exercise in unlearning. Weiss strips things of their familiar names and forces us to look more closely. The order of the city emerges from individual observations that remain provisional. The outsider’s perspective reveals how much of what appears self-evident rests on learned rules and social conventions.

In Der Fremde, Weiss connects entering a city with the past of the person arriving: “Thus I enter the city, covered in the dust of the past.” The city may be new, but the person entering it is not. They bring memories, expectations and wounds. Their previous life helps determine what they perceive and what they expect of their future.

In Fluchtpunkt, this experience becomes concrete in an arrival whose date is precisely recorded. On 8 November 1940, the narrator reaches Stockholm. From the railway station, he travels to a boarding house where an acquaintance has reserved a room for him. This first journey already shows how much arrival depends on relationships mediated by others. In the room, the narrator finds traces of previous occupants. “This room was now to contain my footsteps,” he writes. An unfamiliar space is to become the setting of his own life.

The city is already inhabited. Its spaces are in use, its opportunities are distributed, its relationships are established. The newcomer must find a place in a world of everyday life that has developed without them. At the same time, they bring their own history, abilities and ideas of a possible life. Where can they live? How can they earn a living? What relationships can they establish? The answers depend on their own possibilities, on the people they encounter and on the social conditions under which they must live. Understanding a city and being able to live in it are different experiences.

Belonging and Changing

The traveler in the Report experiences a moment when his foreignness recedes. He has adapted his behavior to his surroundings and is no longer singled out by those present. Nobody examines his clothing or looks at him long enough to notice any differences. The fact that nobody pays attention to him makes him “part of the whirling whole”. He feels relieved that “everyone accepts him”. For a moment, his presence has become a matter of course.

Being able to participate in everyday urban life does not yet mean belonging. A person may know the routes, speak the language, work and maintain relationships – and still be treated as a foreigner. Belonging depends on whether others are willing to recognize someone as an equal member of their community.

In his Lessing Prize speech Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Sprache (1965), Weiss describes how a person can even be denied membership in their own linguistic community: “When he seeks to speak on his own behalf, his words are declared invalid.” Here, foreignness does not arise from insufficient knowledge or inadequate adaptation. It is socially and politically produced. To deny the validity of a person’s voice is to deny them equal participation in collective life.

Those already present do not form a homogeneous community. Many have themselves arrived at some point; others have lived in the same place for generations. What some experience as a familiar order appears to others as an imposition. Even among those supposedly native to a place, experiences of belonging and foreignness differ. Newcomers do not enter a closed world. They enter existing relationships, establish new connections, change habits and challenge expectations. They change their own lives – and the city in which they arrive.

Foreignness is part of urban life: the urban makes it possible for people with different histories, experiences and ideas to live together. Their encounters create new relationships, generate conflicts and change habits. The city is not a closed whole. Its distinctive character emerges from what endures and from what new people and experiences bring to it.

Distilling and Remaining Open

City brands create a “fictional completeness” (Christoph Peters, Tage in Tokio, 2021): different experiences, narratives and expectations come together to form an image through which the city becomes imaginable as a whole. Nobody can fully grasp its diversity. Such images provide orientation and generate expectations. They emerge both from a city’s organized self-presentation and from the experiences and stories of the people who come into contact with it. Every act of distillation highlights certain characteristics while allowing others to recede. What corresponds to the familiar image appears typical. What deviates from it is declared an exception or overlooked. Precisely because the image provides orientation, it can become resistant to contradictory experiences.

Weiss’s outsider’s perspective invites us to question the familiar terms used by city brands. What does it mean in everyday urban life when a city describes itself as open, international or livable? We could treat the word “open” in the same way as the ticket in the Report: set aside the familiar term and describe precisely what happens. Who gains access to a city and its opportunities? Who belongs as a matter of course, and who must repeatedly justify their presence? Whose experiences shape the image of the city, and whose remain outside it? When a city brand speaks of a collective “we”, the question arises of who is entitled to speak for the city and to change its understanding of itself.

A city brand can provide orientation, articulate shared aspirations and make a city’s distinctive character recognizable. The ideas it conveys must remain open to scrutiny and change. The experiences of newcomers reveal what opportunities a city offers, what boundaries it draws and how its inhabitants deal with differences.

If cities are continually transformed through the coexistence of different people, their brands cannot be concerned exclusively with preserving an existing identity. Newcomers are not merely the intended recipients of an urban promise. They themselves help shape what will distinguish the city in the future. For individual cities, this suggests a strategic option: to make openness to outsiders and to the unfamiliar the core of their brand. Such a positioning would express a willingness to grant people of different backgrounds belonging and opportunities to participate in shaping the city, and to allow new experiences, ideas and ways of life to change it. Openness would not simply be a characteristic that a city claims for itself, but an aspiration guiding its future development.

This aspiration would have to be grounded in the city’s actual living conditions. It would challenge its institutions as well as the people already living there. In the face of nation-state exclusion and the xenophobia of right-wing populism, it would acquire political significance. It would be credible only if the urban community were willing to practice openness in everyday life – including where newcomers challenge familiar ideas and habits. A city that makes openness the core of its brand does more than promise to welcome outsiders. It declares its willingness to become a different city through their presence.

27. OCTOBER 2026

A POST BY:

Dr. Eric Häusler

Dr. Eric Häusler is a historian and urbanist. His current research project at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich is dedicated to a comparison of past urban visions of the future in Tokyo and New York during the 1960s. As a visiting scholar, he has been affiliated with institutions including Sophia University in Tokyo, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. His additional research interests include critical engagement with questions of urban marketing and the growing field of global urban history.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Häusler

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Häusler is an honorary professor of strategic corporate communications at the University of Leipzig. Until his retirement in 2015, he was Chairman of Interbrand Central and Eastern Europe and advised companies and organizations worldwide on the development of brands. As a social scientist, he has worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, among other places.

Contact: juergenghaeusler@gmail.com

Geopolitical containers

Andrey Matuzov — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 16:36:43 +0000

I explore how humanity’s shared heritage becomes a political resource. From the sarafan and kaftan to language, myths, and collective memory, I examine what I call “geopolitical containers”: shared narratives that create a collective “we” and lay the foundations for alliances, institutions, and states. Drawing on ideas from my book SARAFAN: Conscience as a System, I consider how cultural origins become claims of ownership, how intellectual communities shape historical consciousness, and why recognizing our common inheritance matters for humanity’s future.

Rob Lowe, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Robert Downey Jr.

Vera JLZN — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:21:33 +0000

Rob Lowe, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Robert Downey Jr. at the Governors Ball after the 1988 Academy Awards

The Guess Who - American Woman - 1974

Vera JLZN — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:15:26 +0000

Sean Young practicing her ballet extensions by the river in New York, c. 1975-1978. Photo by Alexander Borodulin.

Vera JLZN — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:12:48 +0000

Before her film career began with Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980) and Blade Runner (1982), Sean Young was a trained dancer who studied at the School of American Ballet in New York City

Suzanne Somers 70's

Vera JLZN — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:06:48 +0000

Stevie Wonder performing “Superstition” during his guest appearance on "Sesame Street" (1973).

Vera JLZN — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:03:47 +0000

Kathy Ireland 1987

Vera JLZN — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:00:43 +0000

Kenya Safari Packages: Discover the Magic of Kenya

rickshawtravels — Wed, 4 Nov 2026 08:06:28 +0000

Kenya is one of Africa’s most celebrated safari destinations, offering spectacular wildlife, diverse landscapes, and unforgettable cultural experiences. With thoughtfully planned Kenya safari packages, travelers can explore famous national parks, witness incredible wildlife, and experience the natural beauty of East Africa. Rickshaw Travel Group offers personalized travel experiences designed to make your Kenya adventure memorable and convenient.

Explore Kenya’s Famous Safari Destinations

A Kenya safari provides opportunities to discover some of Africa’s most remarkable wildlife destinations. The Maasai Mara National Reserve is a major highlight, known for its expansive grasslands and abundant wildlife. Visitors can encounter lions, elephants, cheetahs, leopards, giraffes, zebras, and numerous bird species during guided game drives.

Other destinations can add variety to your itinerary. Amboseli National Park is known for its spectacular views of Mount Kilimanjaro and large elephant populations. Lake Nakuru offers opportunities to see rhinos, flamingos, and other wildlife, while Tsavo National Parks provide vast landscapes and diverse ecosystems to explore.

Experience the Great Migration

One of the most memorable experiences associated with Kenya is the Great Migration. During the migration season, large herds of wildebeest and zebras move through the Maasai Mara ecosystem as part of their annual movement across East Africa.

The exact timing and location of wildlife activity can vary, so choosing suitable travel dates and destinations is important. Rickshaw Travel Group can help travelers plan an itinerary around their interests and preferred safari experience.

Kenya Safari Packages for Every Traveler

Kenya safari packages can be tailored to different travel preferences. Couples may choose romantic safari getaways, families can enjoy wildlife-focused adventures, and travelers seeking comfort can select luxury lodges or premium tented camps.

Private safaris provide greater flexibility, while group tours can offer a social way to explore Kenya. Packages can also combine safari experiences with coastal relaxation in destinations such as Mombasa or Diani Beach.

Travel With Rickshaw Travel Group

Rickshaw Travel Group helps travelers organize memorable Kenya holidays with carefully planned itineraries and destination-focused experiences. From wildlife viewing and comfortable accommodation to guided game drives and personalized travel arrangements, every journey can be designed around individual preferences.

Plan Your Kenya Safari Adventure

A Kenya safari offers an exciting opportunity to experience Africa’s wildlife, landscapes, and culture. With well-planned Kenya safari packages from Rickshaw Travel Group, you can explore iconic reserves, enjoy unforgettable wildlife encounters, and create lasting memories of your East African adventure.

AI App Builder for Internal Tools: Build Smarter Business Applications with PromptXL

promptxl — Tue, 3 Nov 2026 07:18:52 +0000

Introduction

Businesses rely on internal tools to manage workflows, organize information, track performance, and improve employee productivity. However, traditional software development can require significant time, technical expertise, and resources. An AI app builder for internal tools offers a practical solution by helping businesses create customized applications using artificial intelligence and natural language instructions.

PromptXL helps users explore AI-powered application development by transforming ideas and prompts into functional app-building experiences. Whether you want to create an employee dashboard, inventory management system, project tracker, or customer support tool, AI-powered development can simplify the process of building applications for everyday business needs.

With AI app development, businesses can reduce repetitive manual work, improve workflow visibility, and create digital tools that support their specific operational requirements.

What Is an AI App Builder for Internal Tools?

An AI app builder is a development platform that uses artificial intelligence to help users create applications with less manual coding.

Internal tools are applications designed specifically for employees, teams, and business operations rather than public customers. These applications help organizations manage information, automate tasks, and improve communication.

Examples of internal tools include:

· Employee management dashboards

· Inventory tracking applications

· Project management systems

· Sales performance dashboards

· Customer relationship management tools

· Internal reporting applications

· Task automation platforms

Using PromptXL, users can explore AI-assisted app creation and turn business requirements into application concepts through prompts and development workflows.

How PromptXL Simplifies Internal Tool Development

Traditional application development often involves planning, coding, testing, and deployment. AI-assisted development can make several parts of this process more accessible.

1. Describe Your Business Requirements

Start by explaining what your internal application should accomplish.

For example, you might request an employee dashboard that displays attendance, assigned tasks, project updates, and performance information.

Clear instructions help AI understand the application's purpose, intended users, and essential features.

2. Generate Application Components

AI-assisted development can help create application layouts, interface elements, forms, dashboards, and supporting code.

Instead of starting with an empty development environment, users can work from an initial application concept and refine it according to their requirements.

3. Customize Your Internal Application

Every organization has different workflows and operational needs.

You can refine an application by describing additional features, changing interface layouts, adjusting data fields, or improving how information is presented.

This iterative approach helps businesses explore different application designs without planning every detail manually from the beginning.

4. Test and Improve the Application

Before using an internal tool in business operations, review its functionality, user experience, data handling, and security requirements.

AI-generated applications still require testing and appropriate technical review, especially when they manage sensitive business information.

Benefits of Using an AI App Builder for Internal Tools

Faster Application Development

AI-assisted development can accelerate initial application creation by generating code and interface components from written instructions.

This helps teams explore ideas and develop prototypes more efficiently.

Reduced Development Complexity

Users can describe business requirements in natural language rather than writing every component manually.

Although technical knowledge may still be necessary for advanced applications, AI tools can make the development process more approachable.

Customized Business Workflows

Internal applications can be designed around specific business processes instead of relying entirely on generic software.

This flexibility helps organizations create tools that match their operational requirements.

Improved Employee Productivity

Internal dashboards and workflow applications can bring information together in one place.

Employees may spend less time switching between systems, searching for information, and completing repetitive tasks.

Easier Application Prototyping

Businesses can experiment with different application ideas before committing to a larger development project.

AI-generated prototypes help teams visualize workflows and identify necessary improvements.

Internal Tools You Can Build with PromptXL

Employee Management Dashboard

Create an application for organizing employee information, tracking responsibilities, and reviewing team activities.

Inventory Management Tool

Develop an internal interface for monitoring product quantities, recording stock updates, and reviewing inventory information.

Project Tracking Application

Build a dashboard that helps teams manage project milestones, assignments, deadlines, and progress.

Sales Reporting Dashboard

Create an application for organizing sales information, reviewing performance metrics, and identifying business trends.

Customer Support Management Tool

Develop an internal interface for tracking support requests, organizing customer issues, and managing response workflows.

The suitability of each application depends on the available development features, integrations, and data requirements.

Why Choose PromptXL for AI App Development?

PromptXL provides an AI-powered environment for exploring application creation through prompts and development workflows.

Businesses and individuals can use AI-assisted development to experiment with application ideas, create prototypes, and explore customized digital solutions.

When building internal tools, consider the platform's available features, model options, integrations, and deployment capabilities.

For applications involving business-critical information, evaluate authentication, user permissions, database configuration, security, and ongoing maintenance before deployment.

Visit PromptXL at https://promptxl.com/ to explore its AI app-building capabilities.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is an AI app builder for internal tools?

An AI app builder helps users create applications for business operations using artificial intelligence, natural language prompts, and generated code.

2. Can I build internal tools without coding?

AI app builders can reduce the amount of manual coding required. However, advanced applications may still need technical knowledge for integrations, security, database configuration, and deployment.

3. What internal tools can I create with PromptXL?

Potential applications include employee dashboards, inventory management systems, project trackers, sales reports, and internal workflow applications, depending on the platform's available features.

4. How does AI help businesses build internal applications?

AI can assist with generating application interfaces, code, workflow components, and prototypes. This can help businesses explore ideas and accelerate development.

5. Is AI-generated software ready for business use?

Not automatically. Applications should be tested for functionality, security, data privacy, reliability, and compatibility before being used in business operations.

6. Can AI app builders automate business workflows?

AI app builders can help create applications that support workflow automation. The actual automation capabilities depend on available integrations, permissions, and application configuration.

7. Why use PromptXL for internal tool development?

PromptXL allows users to explore AI-assisted application development and transform written ideas into application-building workflows, making it useful for experimenting with customized business tools.

Conclusion

An AI app builder for internal tools can help businesses simplify application development, improve operational workflows, and create customized digital solutions.

From employee dashboards and inventory systems to project tracking and reporting applications, AI-assisted development provides opportunities to turn business requirements into practical software experiences.

PromptXL offers an AI-powered approach to exploring app creation through prompts and development workflows. By combining clear requirements, thoughtful customization, and proper testing, businesses can develop internal tools that support productivity and more efficient operations.